Khirbet Qeiyafa

Two Gates Above the Elah Valley

Khirbet Qeiyafa is a hilltop ruin in the Shephelah, on the north side of the Elah valley about 30 km south-west of Jerusalem. Y. Garfinkel of the Hebrew University and S. Ganor of the Israel Antiquities Authority dug it from 2007 to 2013. What they uncovered was a small town ringed by a casemate wall of stones weighing several tons, with houses built against the inside of the casemates, and two four-chambered gates — one west, one south. The excavation project's own summary calls it the only known city of the First Temple period with two gates.

Seventeen burnt olive pits from a storage jar in the destruction layer were dated by accelerator mass spectrometry, four of them halved between two laboratories to control for laboratory bias, and published in Radiocarbon in 2015 by Y. Garfinkel, K. Streit, S. Ganor and P. Reimer. Their conclusion on the samples is a date of about 1000 BC. The excavators also report an absence in the animal bones: no pig. Pig is common in the Philistine cities of this period and scarce at sites read as Israelite or Judahite, and that contrast is the strongest single argument anyone has made about who lived here.

On 8 July 2008 a seventeen-year-old volunteer, Oded Yair, lifted a large potsherd off a floor in Area B and dropped it in the finds bucket with everything else from that morning. The writing on it was spotted that afternoon during pottery washing by an area supervisor, Sang-Yeup Chang. It is a trapezoidal sherd about 15 by 16.5 cm carrying five lines in an early alphabetic script. Texts of any length from these centuries are extremely rare — before this one there were essentially two, the Gezer Calendar and the abecedary from Tel Zayit — which is why a faded potsherd from a small town became international news.

What a Wall Can and Cannot Settle

The valley below the site is the one 1 Samuel 17 names: the Philistines at Socoh and Azekah, Israel encamped in the valley of Elah, the two armies on facing slopes. Shaaraim appears three verses from the end of the chapter, on the line of the Philistine retreat, and again in the Shephelah town list of Joshua 15. A reader who stands on this hill is standing where the story is set, and that is worth something on its own.

It is worth being exact about which argument the town actually enters. It is not whether David fought a Philistine champion. Nothing at Khirbet Qeiyafa speaks to that, and no excavated object anywhere does; single combat between two men leaves no archaeological trace, and it would be strange if it did. The argument is about scale of organisation — whether anything in the southern hill country around 1000 BC could quarry, haul and lay multi-ton stones into a planned fortified town, or whether that level of administration arrives only much later. Y. Garfinkel argues the first. He named the radiocarbon paper after the king himself, and reads the site as the earliest fortified city yet known in the kingdom of Judah.

That is a substantial claim and it is his claim, not a neutral description of the evidence, which is why this article names him rather than simply repeating it. Stated at its own weight: a fortified town with monumental gates stood above the Elah valley at about the time the biblical narrative puts a king in Jerusalem, and it was built by somebody with the authority to organise the work. Who that somebody was is the next section.

Two Arguments, Not One

Two separate disputes attach to this site and they get blurred into one constantly. Both are live and neither has a winner. The first is the ostracon. The excavation's own account says that many of the letters are heavily faded and that the reading is problematic, and the published readings since have been incompatible with one another. H. Misgav, the project's epigrapher, read it as Hebrew and picked out words for "do not do," "judge," "slave" and "king." G. Galil published a full reconstruction in 2009 as a Hebrew text about social justice — judge the slave and the widow, plead for the poor — and identified the site with Netaim of 1 Chronicles 4:23. E. Puech read it instead as a local copy of a message from the capital reporting the accession of Saul.

C. Rollston answered in 2011 that the words alleged to be diagnostic of Hebrew are either general Semitic vocabulary or are not in the text at all. A. Millard, an epigrapher writing from an evangelical position, put the limits about as carefully as they can be put: the letters are difficult to read, the language may be Hebrew, Canaanite, Phoenician or Moabite, translations range from a list of names to commands about social justice, and the simplest explanation is a list of Hebrew and Canaanite names written by somebody unused to writing. That is where it stands. No reading commands consensus, and a reader told the ostracon proves anything has been told more than the epigraphers will say. What it does support on nearly every reading — including Millard's deflationary one — is that somebody who was not a trained scribe was writing here at this date, and that is genuinely worth knowing.

The second dispute is who lived here. Y. Garfinkel and S. Ganor read the town as Judahite and identify it with Shaaraim, "two gates," named in Joshua 15:36 and in 1 Samuel 17:52. I. Finkelstein and A. Fantalkin, in Tel Aviv in 2012, read the material as late Iron I and the town's affiliation as northern rather than Judahite. N. Na'aman and I. Koch have argued it is Canaanite, a local centre in the orbit of Philistine Gath or Ekron rather than a Judahite foundation at all. G. Galil's Netaim and Y. Dagan's Adithaim — the latter standing next to Shaaraim in the same verse of Joshua 15 — are two more candidates. Four identifications, three of them biblical, no agreement, and that is the honest reason this article is filed under the site's modern Arabic name rather than any of them.

Where the app stands: the fortifications and the radiocarbon are solid, and together they make it harder to maintain that nothing in tenth-century Judah could organise a building project on this scale. That is a real result and understating it would be its own dishonesty. It is not the same thing as confirming a narrative in 1 Samuel, and the two are run together so routinely that the distinction is worth holding onto.

Scripture references

• 1 Samuel 17:1-3 — The Philistines at Socoh and Azekah; Israel encamped in the valley of Elah
• 1 Samuel 17:52 — Shaaraim on the line of the Philistine retreat, toward Gath and Ekron
• Joshua 15:35-36 — Shaaraim and Adithaim in the Shephelah town list of Judah
• 1 Chronicles 4:23 — Netaim — the identification G. Galil proposed from his reading of the ostracon

Sources

• Holding institutionThe Khirbet Qeiyafa Archaeological Project — Institute of Archaeology, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem · The excavation's own project site, including its account of the discovery of the ostracon on 8 July 2008 and its statement that many of the letters are heavily faded and the reading problematicSupports: Excavation dates and directors, the two gates, and the excavators' own caution about the ostracon
• ScholarshipY. Garfinkel, K. Streit, S. Ganor and P. Reimer, "King David's City at Khirbet Qeiyafa: Results of the Second Radiocarbon Dating Project" — Yosef Garfinkel, Katharina Streit, Saar Ganor and Paula J. Reimer · Radiocarbon 57:5 (2015), 881-890. Seventeen burnt olive pits, four halved between two laboratories; the dating of the samples is about 1000 BC. The title is the excavator's own reading of what the site is, and the article is cited here for the dates rather than for the titleSupports: The radiocarbon date, and Garfinkel's interpretation of the site as a Judahite city
• ScholarshipI. Finkelstein and A. Fantalkin, "Khirbet Qeiyafa: An Unsensational Archaeological and Historical Interpretation" — Israel Finkelstein and Alexander Fantalkin, Tel Aviv University · Tel Aviv 39:1 (2012), 38-63. Reads the site as late Iron I and disputes both the Judahite affiliation and the excavation's interpretation of the findsSupports: The northern / late Iron I reading of the site
• ScholarshipC. Rollston, "The Khirbet Qeiyafa Ostracon: Methodological Musings and Caveats" — Christopher A. Rollston · Tel Aviv 38 (2011), 67-82. Argues that the vocabulary said to identify the text as Hebrew is either general Semitic or absent from the inscription. Print and subscription only · paywalledSupports: The case against reading the ostracon as identifiably Hebrew
• ScholarshipA. Millard, "The Ostracon from the Days of David Found at Khirbet Qeiyafa" — Alan Millard, University of Liverpool · Tyndale Bulletin 62:1 (2011), 1-13, freely readable. His own summary: the letters are difficult to read, the language may be Hebrew, Canaanite, Phoenician or Moabite, and the simplest explanation is a list of names written by someone unused to writingSupports: The limits of what can be read off the ostracon, stated from within the evangelical scholarly tradition
• ScholarshipN. Na'aman, "Khirbet Qeiyafa in Context" — Nadav Na'aman, Tel Aviv University · Ugarit-Forschungen 42 (2010), 497-526. The case for reading the town as a Canaanite centre rather than a Judahite foundation. Print onlySupports: The Canaanite reading of the site
• ScholarshipG. Galil, "The Hebrew Inscription from Khirbet Qeiyafa/Neta'im" — Gershon Galil, University of Haifa · Ugarit-Forschungen 41 (2009), 193-242. The social-justice reading of the ostracon and the identification of the site with Netaim. Print onlySupports: Galil's reading and identification
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Khirbet Qeiyafa

Further reading

• The Khirbet Qeiyafa Archaeological Project (Hebrew University)
• Wikipedia: Khirbet Qeiyafa

Reflect

Five faded lines have produced four incompatible translations by careful people. Where do you hold a reading of something more firmly than the evidence for it actually allows?